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Archive for January 31st, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Thai prison officials released 62 Rohingya migrants being held in detention in southern Ranong province Saturday, handing them over to immigration authorities for deportation.The adult Muslim migrants...
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Thai prison officials released 62 Rohingya migrants being held in detention in southern Ranong province yesterday, handing them over to immigration authorities for deportation.The adult Muslim migrant...
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
29/01/2009By PATSINEE KRANLERT
Bangkok PostSunshine and rainbows don't always follow a shower of rain, yet this man, laid low by a land mine almost two decades ago, has managed to piece together a new life for himself.
A soldier in the Cambodian army until he lost both hands during a mine-clearing operation in 1990, Tok Vanna spent the next 12 years living in dire poverty.
In 2002 he moved to Siem Reap with his family in search of a job, but his disability proved a major obstacle and he only managed to eke out an existence by begging on the streets. The following year his luck finally turned when he was spotted by a staff member from ILO, the United Nations agency.
After finishing a vocational training course, during which he also learned basic English, he received a small sum in seed capital from the ILO, sufficient to buy a pushcart and some books and set himself up in business.
Today his streetside stall boasts a large and interesting selection including an impressive number of non-fiction titles on Cambodia, mostly dealing with the devastation wreaked on that country by decades of conflict and the depredations of the Khmer Rouge.
As I stood there flipping through books with harrowing names like Welcome to Hell, Stay Alive My Son and First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, he drew my attention to a tome with a red cover which he was holding against his chest with a truncated limb: "This is the best I have," he said in a gentle voice, "I recommend it to everybody."
I left carrying a copy of Survival in the Killing Fields, an account of life under the Khmer Rouge by Dr Haing Ngor, who later won an Oscar for his role in 1984's The Killing Fields.
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Some 30,000 supporters of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra gathered in Bangkok on Saturday to rally against the new Thai government they accuse of illegitimately assuming power last month. More than ...
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Thai prison officials have released 62 Rohingya refugees being held in detention in southern Ranong province, handing them over to immigration authorities for deportation.Immigration authorities said ...
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
-(Dow Jones)- Thailand's economy is estimated to have contracted by 2% to 3% on year in the fourth quarter of last year and is expected to shrink further in the current quarter, said Prime Minister ...
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
By Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer
Phnom Penh
30 January 2009Two films of Tuol Sleng prison provided to researchers by the Vietnamese government could become evidence in Khmer Rouge tribunal proceedings against the prison’s former chief.
Two deputy prosecutors for the Khmer Rouge tribunal made a motion to the Trial Chamber to allow two films to be entered as new evidence in the atrocity trial of prison chief Duch.
The Trial Chamber must decide by Feb. 17 whether to add the films, which include footage of Tuol Sleng prison shot by Vietnamese soldiers as they entered Phnom Penh in January 1979 as they pushed the Khmer Rouge from power.
The films depict the bodies of prisoners, some of them decapitated, as well as different types of cells, torture devices, shackles and other restraints. One film shows a Vietnamese soldier carrying a weak child out of the prison in his arms and two more child survivors.
The films are two among 20, totaling 480 minutes of footage, that have so far been submitted to the Documentation Center of Cambodia by the Vietnamese.
Duch, 66, whose real name is Kaing Kek Iev, will be tried in March on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and murder for his role as chief of the prison, known to the Khmer Rouge by it’s alphanumeric code S-21.
“The films provided by the Vietnamese government through DC-Cam are related to the indictment against Duch,” the deputy prosecutors, Yeth Chakrya and William Smith, said in their motion to the Trial Chamber. “Those documents are very interesting for finding out the truth about S-21.”
Judge Nil Nonn, head of the Trial Chamber, confirmed he had received the motion, which was filed Jan. 28 and published on the tribunal’s Web site Friday.
The motion will be decided on during the initial trial hearing on Feb. 17, Nil Nonn said.
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
THE UN refugee agency yesterday refused to comment on the condition of teenagers from Myanmar being held in Thai custody out of "courtesy" to Thailand's government.The United Nations High Co...
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
A fisherman mends a net. Photograph: Brian Harris
Friday January 30th 2009The Guardian (UK)Promised better-paid jobs across the border in Thailand, Cambodian men are being kidnapped by gangs of traffickers and sold onto illegal fishing boats that trawl the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. For two years Chorn Theang Ly was kept at sea under armed guard. He describes how his quest for a better life turned into a nightmare
I live in the village of Anlong Khran in Cambodia. One day a man came to the village and said we should go to Thailand as we would have a much easier life there. Here, we work in rice fields, growing our own rice and vegetables. We make up to $200 a year. The man said we would make a lot more than that in Thailand.
He took a dozen of us over the border. We paid him 7,000 Thai baht for this – 3,000 for the transport plus a month’s worth of our pay. He said we would work on the riverbank, in factories, and have a much better life.
When we got to Thailand he took us to a house. Suddenly we were locked up inside it, all of us together in one room. It was only then that I realised that we had been sold. We tried different ways of escaping, all of us, but we had no money, passports or papers; there was nowhere for us to go.
We stayed there all night. Then, at about 4am, we got a wake-up call. Some men took us to a fishing boat, and that's when I realised what would happen to us. We had been trafficked. It was too late to do anything. We were powerless.
At sea, we all got seasick. I remember it got so bad for me that I was vomiting blood. As a group we decided we would stick at it for one month, earn our wages and then somehow get back to Cambodia.
The boat's owner told me we would have to work for him for at least three years. I found out that there is a whole system at work: a good employer lets you go ashore after eight or 10 months and pays you off, but a bad one will keep you at sea for three years and not pay you anything, or just a token amount.
Conditions on board were very hard for us. We worked all hours of the day, and there was little food or fresh water, just one small bucket. If we got a big catch we’d have to work day and night, slicing and gutting fish. If there was a torn net we would have to work for two or three nights without sleep to repair it. Another boat would sometimes meet us to take the catch and give us more food and water. We scarcely saw land.
I saw killings too, with my own eyes. There were three Thai crew on board and they were all armed. The captain would physically abuse us. In the early days he beat me nearly unconscious. He would beat us with the tentacle of a squid or sometimes a large shell. The man I saw killed was beaten and then thrown overboard. Another time, a man was shot and his body thrown into the sea.
We were constantly plotting to kill the captain and take the boat ashore. But the crew had guns and we knew we couldn't do it.
I was transferred to other boats after that first one. In the end I was at sea for two years. Finally, when a boat I was on put ashore in Thailand I persuaded them to let me go. They took me back to the border in a truck and left me there. With the help of one of the traffickers I got back across the border into Cambodia.
There are many people from my area who still want to go to Thailand. I tell them about the cruelty and the lies, but they are determined. The problem is there is so little to do here. We used to make money from charcoal, cutting and burning trees, but the government stopped that for environmental reasons. How else are we supposed to make a living?
• Chorn Theang Ly was talking to Jonathan Gorvett in Cambodia.
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Barack Obama, illustrated by Bun Heang Ung
By Tharum Bun
Global Voices OnlineAs the number of Internet users has been growing rapidly in Southeast Asia in recent years, online censorship has proliferated, from China to Cambodia, as if it runs through the Mekong river.
Not only the “Great Firewall of China” that is known to many people, democratic country like Thailand also blocks a large number of Web sites; in Vietnam, its Ministry of Information and Communication has recently released a circular to regulate and enforce blogging rules in the country in late 2008. With rules and regulations in place, these governments have developed and deployed their own censorship machine to control how citizens publish and access online contents.
Although Cambodia has the lowest Internet penetration rate (70,000 users as of 2007), artists, however, are more recognized not through offline exhibitions, but their presence on the world wide web. This increasing use of blog to reach out larger audiences attracts more than attention and support.
A former freelance editorial cartoonist for Far Eastern Economic Review from 1997-1999, Bun Heang Ung presently lives in Australia. Observing his home country Cambodia from the other side, the 57-year-old cartoonist launched Sacrava Toons blog in 2004, nearly a decade after he published ‘The Murderous Revolution : Life and Death in Pol Pot's Kampuchea,' his first book of black and white line illustrations that tells his very own experiences of the Khmer Rouge regime. In voicing his opinions, the talented cartoonist publish his drawings of all things that matter to him on the Web. In one of his recent posts, he used ‘I have a dream' as a backdrop for his illustration of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.
Recently, according to Wikileaks, the political cartoonist's blog is being blocked in Thailand, where its Ministry of Information and Communication Technology is in charge of banning Internet sites that violates its Kingdom's lèse majesté.
Cambodian blogger Thom Vanak, at Blog By Khmer, made his point on the issue:
Regarding Lèse majesté, although I think it's archaic and outdated law in this day and age, but nevertheless, it's still Thai's law. If I ever set my foot on Thai soil I would respect their laws. The same if I'm to visit any other country, I would respect the local laws of that country.
While the prominent cartoonist's blog appears on censorship list (as of 20 Dec 2008) by Thailand, the Cambodian Ministry of Women's Affairs, in December last year, threatened to block a Web site that contains artistic illustrations of bare-breasted Apsara dancers and a Khmer Rouge soldier. The attempt to shut down reahu.net (or at least to filter it by Internet Service Providers in the Cambodian capital) was echoed by a human rights activist, who was quoted as saying that “the Web site should be shut down because it appealed too much to young Cambodians.”
Reahu.net is currently not accessible by Internet visitors in Cambodia, while there is no issue with access in the U.S. The error message appears:
Screenshot of reahu.net site being filtered by Cambodia's Internet Service Providers
Cambodia's most prominent anonymous blog author at ‘Cambodia: Details are Sketchy' wrote about the controversial issue:
“If anyone should understand the value of free speech, the deputy director of communication and advocacy at Licadho seems a likely candidate. It is disheartening that Vann Sophath supports censoring Reahu’s illustrations”
Artist Reahu posted a note on his site, recently becoming popular after gaining media attentions in the past few months, in response to his critics:
Judging from the complaints, I wonder how we as Khmer will be able to make it in the 21st Century. Please be open-minded, you must be able to see beyond the four walls surrounding your hut.
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World News
Iran to free female American for holiday clemency (AP) 
Suicide attack in Russia kills 17, wounds over 130 (AP) 
Somali refugees tell of hellish scene in Mogadishu (AP) 
4 al-Qaida prisoners escape US custody in Iraq (AP) 
29/01/2009
A fisherman mends a net. Photograph: Brian Harris
Barack Obama, illustrated by Bun Heang Ung
Screenshot of reahu.net site being filtered by Cambodia's Internet Service Providers